The U.S. is facing an affordable housing shortage. It’s also facing increased climate disaster. So how do we build resilient homes at scale? Here are a couple solutions.
Depending on which expert you ask, the country needs somewhere between 2 million and 5 million more homes to address the shortage. On top of that, much of the existing housing stock is vulnerable to intensifying climate and weather changes. In 2024, Hurricane Helene destroyed 1,000 homes in North Carolina alone. In 2025, the Southern California wildfires destroyed more than 12,000 homes — mine among them.
When we lost our 99-year-old house in the Altadena fire a year ago, poet Mary Brancaccio, my wife, remarked that we had the perfect house for the last hundred years. What we needed to build, she said, was a house for the next hundred.
This Old House Radio Hour and Marketplace worked together on a special report exploring that idea. It’s called “Building Tomorrow.” In it, we meet some great people building differently.
People like my neighbor Heidi Luest, who’s got property about three blocks east of mine. She lost a beloved house of 25 years in the Eaton fire a little more than a year ago. But what she’s rebuilding is something more.
“I'm building a bunker. So I decided to name my house Edith,” Luest said.
As in, Edith Bunker, from the ‘70s sitcom “All in the Family.”
“Sorry, I have to make a joke out of everything,” Luest said. “But I figured, as long as I have a house and it's gonna be strong and sturdy, why not give her a name?”
Luest is building with panels that look like they’re pressed from Styrofoam cups. These are “insulated concrete forms.”
“So it's ICF blocks. It's basically 2-inch foam, 6-inch concrete, another 2-inch foam,” she explained. “You put rebar in the center and you pour concrete in it. It can take up to 250 mile-an-hour winds. It's gonna give me a four- to six-hour firewall. And I probably won't need any heating or cooling because it's that insulated. It’s like a Lego. It's got the tongue and groove, and they kind of snap together.”
“I'm saving in labor because it's not back-breaking,” Luest said. “Literally, there's only three guys building it.”
Three blocks south, another burned parcel now holds three 800-square-foot homes being assembled by prefab company LiveLarge Home. Musician Aloe Blacc owns the property.
“Near completion. They are just working on final touches,” he said. “The whole thing came on a crane. These two halves were put together. What I did not want was the headache of the trauma of a fire, and then the headache of a contractor, who will sign and then go take a bunch of other work and never show up or have supply issues. I got what I paid for. And it was delivered earlier than expected.”
The homes use fiber cement rather than wood.
“So California, we have floods earthquakes and fires,” Blacc said. “Fiber cement is fire resistant. We held a torch to the wall for three minutes and it did nothing but put like a black mark that you just wipe off with a rag.”
He had planned the property for his father.
“Unfortunately, my father passed. So he won't be living here,” Blacc said. “But because this community is in such need of housing, people will want to live near where they're building. Lucky enough to be part of this beautiful community and help restore it in the way that I can.”
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And then there’s the question of existing homes. For those who aren’t rebuilding from the ground up, how can they prepare for the future?
I remembered a visit years ago to a renovated duplex in the Boston area, where physicist Zeyneb Magavi tried to make her home as environmentally friendly as possible. At the time, she showed me insulation made from ground-up blue jeans and an $800 LED fixture that today costs $26.
Eighteen years later, Magavi is still iterating. Her home is being connected to an underground geothermal well.
“The best moment of a gas boiler approaches 98%, 99% efficiency,” Magavi said. “With a geothermal heat pump for a single building, it's four or five times, so it's like 400% or 500% efficiency.”
She had designed the house to evolve.
“With the geothermal coming on, and also with much hotter summers since we began this, the stuff's in the walls already. And all we have to do is install the equipment,” she said. “I certainly approached this home as a forever home, as a place I wanted to invest in, not just for myself — for my kids, for the community, and I was really trying intentionally to build a home for the future.”
Originally reported by David Brancaccio in Market Place.
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